“Internet Time” and Time

Stewart Brand

The Long Now Foundation

Moore’s WallSeries1

Metcalfe’s Law: “The power of a net grows as the square of the number of nodes on the net.”

NET epiphany sequence1. It’s happening!

2. It’s happening everywhere!

3. It’s an awesome new tool!

4. It’s better than real life!

5. It’s replacing real life!

6. It’s swallowing the whole economy!

7. It’s self-organizing!

8. It’s alive!

9. It’s smarter than us!

10. It is worthy of worship.

“Digital information lasts forever, or five years, whichever comes first.”

—Jeff Rothenberg

Solving the Y10K problem…• Four-digit year dates run out in 9999 CE

• And the date 0000 CE is very awkward.

• Five-digit year dates are needed.

• In the stately light of 10,000 years, it is appropriate to write this year as:

01999

Data watershed year(from Michael Lesk, Bellcore)

• Information in the world in 01998:12,000 petabytes (12 billion gigabytes)

• Digital storage in the world in 0199812,300 petabytes

• Storage surpassed data

• Nothing need be thrown away

• Maintaining data surpasses entering data

Eek! of the week (20 Aug 01999)

• 3.4 terabytes may be stored on a surface the size of a credit card, read/writeable at 100 megabits/second, using a new 3-D magneto-optical system on a new family of alloys, developed at Cavendish Management Resources, Keele University, Britain, by Ted Williams and team.

(Williams previously developed NMR technology for body scanning.)

The Digital Dark Age

• New generations of software and platforms make old data unreadable– “Migration” required every 10 years– Old data grows in value– Almost no one is working on the problem, because it

lives in a slower time frame than the computer industry can handle.

• RESULT: catastrophic obsolescence of data

Digital Continuity strategies

• Standard metadata on files

• Slow and fast tracks (Carlston)

• AI “users” (Lanier)

• Emulators (Net gamers)

• “Write once, read anytime” coding

Is

the Internet

profoundly robust and immortal

or

is it the most ephemeral digital artifact of all ?

(THE CLOCK OF THE LONG NOW, Basic Books 1999)

Scholars have a crucial role

• Scholars have special responsibility to force high tech organizations and archival organizations to SOLVE the digital continuity problem

or else...

www.longnow.org